George F. Will Tackles N.P.V.

I haven’t blogged about the National Popular Vote initiative for a while (not since June!), for which I apologize—or for which I acknowledge your gratitude, whichever applies. A lot’s been going on, some positive (Governor Jerry Brown signed the California bill, bringing the N.P.V. compact almost halfway to the trigger point of 270 electoral votes), some negative (though there is a lively, not entirely one-sided debate about the merits of N.P.V. in Republican circles, the R.N.C. passed a resolution denouncing it).

The Cause is getting more attention in the punditocracy, too. His Excellency George F. Will touched on it in a column a week or so ago, and, since Will is a serious person, I feel it my duty to point out where he gets it wrong. First, though, I must point out where he gets it right.

To his credit, Will devotes the first two-thirds of his column to a critique of the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania legislature’s effort to switch from statewide winner-take-all to a system of one electoral vote per Congressional district (with the two additional electors that each state gets going to the statewide winner). This change, which at first glance may look to the unwary like an improvement, would simply superimpose the horrors of rigged congressional-district reapportionment onto the Presidential election.

Because Democratic voters tend to be more geographically concentrated than Republican voters, congressional-district apportionment tends to favor Republicans even in the absence of overtly partisan gerrymandering. Will writes that if the proposed Pennsylvania system had been in place nationally in 1960 and 1976, popular-vote winners Kennedy and Carter, respectively, would have lost to popular-vote losers Nixon and Ford. (And in 2000, as Will does not mention, half-million-popular-vote-loser George W. Bush would have “won” the election outright, without any need for a Florida fuss or a judicial coup d’état.) Will makes another excellent point: “Pennsylvania’s plan would encourage third parties to cherry-pick particular districts, periodically producing ‘winners’ with only national pluralities of electoral votes, leaving the House to pick presidents.”

The Pennsylvania plan is actually worse than Will says it is. (For example, President Obama could win Pennsylvania’s statewide popular vote handily next year while getting shallacked in the state’s electoral vote, 12 to 8.) Still, props to Will for his principled opposition to a scheme that would, after all, redound to his own ideological and partisan interests.

On the other hand, there’s the final third of Will’s column, which begins:

Now eight states and the District of Columbia, with 132 electoral votes, are pursuing an even worse idea than Pennsylvania’s.

That would be the National Popular Vote, of course. Here’s the rest of what Will has to say on the subject, interspersed with my razzberries from the bleachers.

They have agreed to a compact requiring their electoral votes to be cast for the national popular vote winner, even if he loses their popular vote contests. This compact would come into effect when the states agreeing to it have a decisive 270 electoral votes.

True, and a fairer summary than you normally get from opponents of N.P.V..

Deep-blue California supports the compact. But if it had existed in 2004, the state’s electoral votes would have gone to George W. Bush, even though 1.2 million more Californians favored John Kerry.

Also true. But Californians, like other Americans, care more about who gets to be President than about who gets their state’s electoral votes. In California as elsewhere, Republicans were happy that Bush won the election while Democrats were unhappy that Kerry lost it. Neither California Republicans nor California Democrats would have preferred having their candidate win California’s electoral votes to having him win the Presidency.

Supporters of the compact say they favor direct popular election of presidents. But that exists—within each state.

No it doesn’t. What exists within each state is direct popular election of Presidential electors for that state.

The Framers, not being simple, did not subordinate all values to simple majority rule. The electoral vote system shapes the character of presidential majorities, making it unlikely they will be geographically or ideologically narrow. The Framers wanted rule by certain kinds of majorities—ones suited to moderate, consensual governance of a heterogeneous, continental nation with myriad regional and other diversities.

Very nice, but that’s not why the Framers went for the electoral college. They went for it to appease the Slavocracy. At the constitutional convention, James Wilson of Pennsylvania argued passionately for direct popular election. In principle, James Madison was inclined to agree. Summarizing his own speech to the convention, he wrote, referring to himself in the third person, “The people at large was in his opinion the fittest in itself. It would be as likely as any that could be devised to produce an Executive Magistrate of distinguished Character.” So why not let “the people at large” (i.e., non-enslaved men who had the right to vote) decide? Madison: “There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to the fewest objections.”

The Framers had no objection to direct election per se. Direct election was how their states usually elected their governors and legislators. In 1789, when few people ever travelled more than a few score or a few hundred miles from where they were born and where there was no such thing as “the media” (the few newspapers had very limited circulations), the Framers admittedly worried that voters wouldn’t have as much information about candidates for nationwide as for local office. That is no longer a problem. Anyway, it wasn’t the decisive factor, and neither was high-minded concerns about “moderate, consensual governance,” etc. The decisive factor was slavery.

Will’s last graf:

Such majorities do not materialize spontaneously. They are built by a two-party system’s candidates who are compelled to cater to entire states and to create coalitions of states. Today’s electoral vote system provides incentives for parties to alter the attributes that make them uncompetitive in important states. It shapes the nation’s regime and hence the national character. The electoral college today functions differently than the Founders envisioned—they did not anticipate political parties—but it does buttress the values encouraged by the federalism the Framers favored, which Pennsylvanians, and others, should respect.

Italics Will’s. Boldface mine—and the key words are the ones I’ve boldfaced. Why should Presidential candidates “cater” to “important states”—i.e., to the ten or so “battleground” states? What about the forty or so _un_important states? Why cater to “states” at all? Why not cater to human beings? Aren’t they “important”? Wouldn’t it be better to give candidates for President of the United States “incentives” to cater to the people of the United States?

Italics mine.

Photograph by Logan Mock-Bunting/Getty Images.

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. He regularly blogs about politics.